I'm going to build a drive box out of a old AT computer tower. All of the drives are going to be IDE, SCSI, USB and FireWire. It will be simple for the SCSI, USB and the Firewire. Just the IDE part is going to be tricky. I'm going to use 3 250watt AT power supplys for this. I found out from a Xbox mod that you can have as many IDE drives as you want but ofcorse only teo drives can work on one interface, but all you have to do is have the Ribbon cable pluged in and have the power off. Not saying you don't need power but have a power switch on the power so when the system is off you can switch on what drives you want (only two at a time unless you use both IDE connections) and turn on the system. The IDE part will only serve for repair use or if the main drive crashes I'll have a quick backup. The rest will be used for as a File Server / httpd, mysql and email. Might even dual boot Tiger and Linux. The only things I would need to buy are as few switches and a roll of 40pin ribbon cable. I have a lot of 40pin connectors just not the cable. Also LEDs would be great also so it will be easyer to know what drive is on or off. I might make it look old school like the hella old ALTAIR 8800 lol.

Well the LED lights will be set multi color. Red for Off and Green for On. There will be 8 IDE drives for the spare IDE including the main drive that are already in the system. Seven SCSI drives for a complete SCSI chain. Eight USB and Firewire converters for eight 2.5 laptop HDs. This means I'll have to add a USB hub and maybe a firewire card for extra ports. Also I got a idea for some PC LPT ports and rewire them to a IDE cable for easyer connecting/disconnecting. Since there are only 25pins to a LPT port i'll have to use two per channel. Unless I can get ahold on some old SCSI plugs.

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